Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Analysis

Although David and Goliath focuses almost exclusively on underdogs and their unexpected advantages, there are moments throughout the book when Gladwell’s analysis highlights something broader—namely, the fact that humans often cling stubbornly to their convictions because they believe them to be moral, even when this is not the case. This dynamic is especially evident in the story Gladwell recounts about Mike Reynolds, who helped institute California’s Three Strikes Law in the aftermath of his daughter’s senseless murder. Throughout the 1990s, Reynolds was celebrated for helping decrease crime by pushing lawmakers to abide by the Three Strikes Law, under which offenders receive prison sentences of between 25 years and life if they commit three crimes—no matter how serious their third crime actually is. In recent years, though, it has become clear that this policy has put a massive strain on the prison system and has possibly done more harm than good. And yet, Reynolds refuses to acknowledge the law’s negative qualities. By placing Reynolds’s uncompromising view alongside the British military’s myopic obsession with power in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s—along with several other instances of unyielding conviction—Gladwell ultimately urges readers to recognize that believing in something doesn’t always make it right.

At first, Gladwell invites readers to empathize with Mike Reynolds. He does this by recounting the story of Reynolds’s daughter’s death, explaining that Kimber Reynolds was in a restaurant parking lot in her hometown of Fresno, California, when two men appeared on a motorcycle, pinned her against her car, snatched her purse, and shot her in the head. Devastated, Mike Reynolds immediately set to work talking to the most influential people he knew about how to address Fresno’s high crime rate. These conversations led to the drafting of the Three Strikes Law, which soon went into effect. In a conversation between Reynolds and Gladwell, Reynolds explains that California had a murder rate of roughly 12 people per day before the Three Strikes Law went into effect. Years after the law was put in place, the rate decreased to 6 people per day. This makes Reynolds feel incredibly “lucky,” since he sees himself as having saved many lives over the years. However, Gladwell is skeptical of this idea, since the murder rate in California had already begun to decline before the law even went into effect. Furthermore, studies have had trouble proving that the law did anything but overcrowd prisons, and some criminologists have even posited that Three Strikes surprisingly “increased the number of violent crimes.” Because of the overwhelming skepticism surrounding the law, California “scaled [it] back” in 2012, but this has had no effect on Reynolds’s unwavering belief that he did the right thing. In turn, his unwillingness to fully assess the ramifications of his idea comes to symbolize the somewhat unsettling human capacity to ignore the greater good in service of what one wants to believe.

Gladwell’s interest in what makes people unquestioningly commit themselves to a cause also extends to the book’s more central preoccupation with power. He implies that belief isn’t the only thing that can lead to unreasonable dedication, demonstrating this by referencing the relentless commitment to law and order that the British military displayed in a particular incident during the Troubles (a period during which the British government and Ireland’s Protestant population fought against Ireland’s Catholic community). This confrontation took place in a Catholic neighborhood called Lower Falls, where the military came to search for “illegal weapons” in the local church. The British military had been instructed to “deal toughly” with “thugs and gunmen,” which is why they overreacted when a riot broke out over their intrusion into the Lower Falls church. When they military finished, they started to walk away, but the crowd flung insults and small stones at them, so they turned around.—after all, they had been instructed to meet resistance with strength. Accordingly, they fired tear gas and began to shoot, only making the crowd angrier and prompting them to throw small homemade bombs. Eventually, the military forced the residents of Lower Falls into their homes and instituted a curfew that lasted for two days, a period during which families weren’t even allowed to go outside to get food for their children. Gladwell uses this story to exemplify the extent to which people will unfortunately devote themselves to the pursuit of power even when it’s not in their best interest—if the military had simply taken the residents’ anger in stride, they could have avoided unnecessary turmoil.

There are, however, times when uncompromising convictions are appropriate. Gladwell makes this clear by recounting the story of the French mountain town of Le Chambon, where the entire population put themselves in danger by openly defying the Nazis and protecting Jewish people during World War II. Although everyone in the town—and especially the local priest, André Trocmé—opened themselves up to extraordinary danger by welcoming Jewish families from all over France, they remained steadfast in their commitment to what they thought was right. Reflecting upon his altruistic actions later in life, Trocmé wrote that “there was no decision to make.” For him, standing up to the Nazis was the only thing to do. The difference between this kind of conviction and the relentlessness of the British military at Lower Falls, of course, is that Trocmé’s actions were motivated by empathy, whereas the British military merely wanted to establish dominance. And though Mike Reynolds’s steadfastness comes from a good place, it, too, lacks the empathetic motivation of Trocmé’s selflessness, since the Three Strikes Law was a punitive measure that likely hurt more people than it saved. By revealing the different forces driving these three forms of conviction, then, Gladwell tacitly prioritizes the kind of commitment that arises out of empathy and morality, though his depiction of conviction as a whole suggests that people are often blind to the moral failures of their beliefs.